Hans Hartung

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Hans Hartung’s dynamic and experimental practice evokes a powerful sense of self expression. His singular visual language established him as a leader in the field of 20th century abstraction and has had a profound influence over subsequent generations of artists.

Hans Hartung’s dynamic and experimental practice evokes a powerful sense of self expression. His singular visual language established him as a leader in the field of 20th century abstraction and has had a profound influence over subsequent generations of artists, in particular proving inspirational to the trajectory of American lyrical abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Leipzig, Germany in 1904, Hartung studied at art schools in both his hometown and Dresden. In the years preceding the outbreak of the Second World War he settled in Paris, where he became acquainted with artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Calder and Joan Miró, and struck up a close friendship with sculptor, Julio González. Associated with the Art Informel and Taschist movements, Hartung would become of one of France’s most significant post-war artists, renowned for his dramatic and innovative approach to abstraction.

Concerned with the translation of the inexpressible onto canvas, Hartung’s emotional abstractions eliminated all figurative elements, pursuing such freedom of gesture and spatial dynamism with a litany of non-traditional tools, including spray guns, brooms and branches from the olive trees that grew in the grounds of his home and studio in the south of France. Balanced between chance and control, Hartung’s oeuvre is unexpectedly pre-meditated. He observed, ‘At the beginning, I act in total freedom. Work, by following its own course, constrains me more and more, and I am less and less at liberty to choose'. His late painting, much of which was made from the confines of a wheelchair, is amongst the most vigorous of his near seven-decades-long career, presenting a renewed sense of freedom, energy and ambition.

On the occasion of its re-opening after extensive renovation work, the Museum of Modern Art presents a retrospective of work by the painter Hans Hartung (1904-1989).

This retrospective is built around a tightly focused selection of some 300 works from various collections – French and international, public and private – and most notably the Hartung-Bergman Foundation. This tribute is a follow-up to the Museum’s acquisition of a group of four works by Hartung in 2017.